Deval Patrick, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division under President Clinton, is hoping to become governor of Massachusetts. Conservatives remember Patrick fondly, as an ideologue so extreme that The New Republic, of all publications, was moved to write: “Deval Patrick has committed the [Clinton] Administration to a vision of racial preference that fulfills the most extravagant fantasies of a conservative attack ad.” He’s also famous for his public announcement, in the face of a Supreme Court ruling that he did not like, that he would resist “every single challenge” to racial gerrymandering brought under that decision. Patrick is, no doubt about it, too liberal for the Bay State.